January is traditionally the month for new year industry predictions but IDC has jumped in early with some crystal ball gazing. The not so surprising part is that transformation has been a recurring theme in the annual IDC predictions over the past several years. During this time, a wave of disruptive technologies has emerged and evolved, forged by the pressures of a global economic recession. In 2011, and certainly beyond, IDC expects these technologies – cloud services, mobile computing, and social networking – to mature and coalesce into a new mainstream platform for both the IT industry and the industries it serves, hopefully CSPs.
The platform transition will be fueled by another solid year of recovery in IT spending. IDC forecasts worldwide IT spending will be $1.6 trillion in 2011, an increase of 5.7% over 2010. While hardware spending will remain strong (7.8% year-over-year growth), the industry will depend to a larger extent on improvements in software spending (5.3% growth) and related project-based services spending (3.5% growth), as well as gains in outsourcing (4% growth). Worldwide IT spending will also benefit from the accelerated recovery in emerging markets, which will generate more than half of all net new IT spending worldwide in 2011.
Spending on public IT cloud services will grow at more than five times the rate of the IT industry in 2011, up 30% from 2010, as organizations move a wider range of business applications into the cloud. Small and medium-sized business cloud use will surge in 2011, with adoption of some cloud resources topping 33% among U.S. midsize firms by year’s end. Meanwhile, the more nascent private cloud model will continue to evolve as infrastructure, software, and service providers collaborate on a range of new offerings and solutions. There will also be vendor battles to determine on whose cloud platform solutions be deployed, and who will provide coherent IT management across multiple public clouds, customers’ private clouds, and their legacy IT environments.
Mobile computing – on a variety of devices and through a range of new applications – will continue to explode in 2011, forming another critical plank in the new industry platform. IDC expects shipments of app-capable, non-PC mobile devices (smartphones, media tablets, etc.) will outnumber PC shipments within the next 18 months – and there will be no looking back. While vendors with a PC heritage will scramble to secure their position in this rapidly expanding market, another battle will be taking place for dominance in the mobile apps market. The level of activity in this market will be staggering, with nearly 25 billion mobile apps expected to be downloaded in 2011, up from just over 10 billion in 2010. Over time, the still-emerging apps ecosystems promise to fundamentally restructure the channels for all digital content and services to consumers.
Social business software has gained significant momentum in the enterprise over the past 18 months and this trend is expected to continue with IDC forecasting a compound annual growth rate of 38% through 2014. In a sure sign that social business has hit the mainstream, IDC expects 2011 to be a year of consolidation as the major software vendors acquire social software providers to jump-start or increase their social business footprint. Meanwhile, the use of social platforms by small and medium-sized businesses will accelerate, with more than 40% of SMBs using social networks for promotional purposes by the year’s end.
As the new mainstream IT platform coalesces in the months ahead, IDC expects it to lay a foundation for IT vendors to support, and profit from, a variety of “intelligent industry” transformations. In retail, mobility and social networking are rapidly changing consumers’ shopping experience as they bring their smartphones into the store for on-site price comparisons and product recommendations. In financial services, mobility and the cloud are bringing mobile banking and payments closer to reality. In the healthcare industry, IDC expects 14% of adult Americans to use a mobile health application in 2011.
All in all, the first predictions for 2011 look vey bright, the questions is, how can CSPs capitalize on some or all of these burgeoning sectors?